September
1, 2012 – Links International Journal of
Socialist Renewal -- The deepening of global crises, the intensification of
popular protest and insurgency, and the spread of revolutionary possibilities
have been generating renewed interest in Marxism and, along with that, a
renewal of Marxism. A key figure in the Marxist tradition – and in the renewal
– is the person who was central in the first revolution to be led by
revolutionary Marxists: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

July 12, 2012 – Links International
Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Tony Cliff was one of the most significant
English-speaking Marxist activists of the late 20th century. When he died
in 2000, after half a century of unceasing activism, his monument was Britain’s
Socialist Workers Party, which, having evolved from the earlier Socialist
Review and International Socialism groups, is the largest far-left organisation
in that country.

As depicted in Ian Birchall’s biography of Cliff, through the
words of a large number of interviewees, not all of whom agreed with him, he
refused to tolerate any hint of hero worship or personal cultism. Never a
drinker, never a smoker and dying with no wealth to his name, his lived a life of
energetic movement and party building combined with literary effort.

June 7, 2012 -- Weekly Worker -- Lenin’s pamphlet "Leftwing" communism -- his last work of
more-than-article size -- was written in spring 1920 in order to be
distributed to the delegates of the 2nd Congress of the Communist
International, or Comintern. The message that Lenin intended to send
cannot be understood apart from the particular circumstances of this
event.

Comintern was founded in spring 1919, a time of great enthusiasm and
hope about the possibility of soviet-style revolutions sweeping across
Europe. Exuberantly confident predictions were made by Lenin and
Grigorii Zinoviev that the 2nd Congress of the new international would
be a gathering not just of parties, but of new soviet republics.
Accordingly, little attention was given to the party as such. As Trotsky
put it later, the hope was that “a chaotic, spontaneous [elemental or stikhiinyi]
assault” would mount in “ever-rising waves, that in this process the
awareness of the leading layers of the working class would become
clarified, and that in this way the proletariat would attain state power
in the course of one or two years”.[1]

May 17, 2012 -- Weekly Worker -- Did Lenin seek to
exclude Mensheviks from Russia's revolutionary organisation in order to
forge a "party of a new type"?

From 1898 on, there existed a political party called the Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia (RSDRP), or Russian Social Democratic Worker Party. Rossiiskaia means “Russian” in the sense of citizens of the Russian state, as opposed to russkaia,
which refers to ethnic Russians. Of course, the party title made no
reference to either of its two later factions, Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks.

At its 7th Congress in March 1918, this party officially changed its name to Rossiiskaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol’shevikov)
or RKP(B). The party now referred to itself as "Bolshevik", even if
only in parentheses. The question arises: did the party ever have an
intermediate title such as RSDRP(B) -- for example, during the period
from April 1917 to March 1918?

No. The label "RSDRP(B)" was occasionally used informally in 1917 (for
reasons to be discussed later), along with other improvised labels.
Nevertheless, a party with the name "RSDRP(B)" never existed.

May 5,
2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Revolutionary
upheavals are made possible by the coming together of a number of diverse
factors, one of which is the organisation, accumulation of experience and
proliferating influence of conscious revolutionaries.

“Did
the Bolshevik Party become the leading party of the Russian proletariat, and
hence the Russian nation, by chance?”, asked Italian revolutionary Antonio
Gramsci in 1924. A brilliant and knowledgeable analyst, he answered his own
question: “The selection process lasted thirty years; it was extremely arduous;
it often assumed what appeared to be the strangest and most absurd forms.” He
added that the process involved “struggles of factions and small groups; ... it
meant splits and fusions ...” (Gramsci, Selections
from Political Writings 1921-1926: 210).

April
17, 2012 – Links International Journal of
Socialist Renewal -- How odd it would be, one century after the fact, to
hear the following over the air waves: NEWS FLASH! THE BOLSHEVIKS BECAME A
POLITICAL PARTY IN 1912! In fact, it was the opposite “news” that flashed
across a little corner of the internet’s far-left end. A young activist in the US
socialist movement, Pham Binh, making positive reference to the outstanding
contributions of historian Lars Lih in challenging myths regarding Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin’s revolutionary organisational perspectives, advanced his own
challenging re-interpretation of Lenin’s thought and practice, claiming to have
exploded “the myth that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
separated into two parties in 1912.”[1]

February 19, 2012 – Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- There has been a competing
set of political agendas underlying the recently initiated historical debate
over how to understand Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From the standpoint of
revolutionary socialism, this aspect of the debate is hardly cause for dismay. As
activists we are appropriately attempting to get a handle on “what is to be
done”. This does not absolve us of the responsibility to get the history right.
But for Marxists the point is not simply to understand history, but also make
use of such understanding to help change the world.

February 16,
2012 – Links International Journal of
Socialist Renewal -- The Occupy movement has been having a profound impact
on the socialist left in the United States. I want to share some information on
this, focusing on my own experience, and relate it to broader issues of Marxism
and organisation that I have been engaged with for some time.

I am
referring to “The mangling of Tony Cliff”, written by Paul D’Amato, International
Socialist Organization (ISO) member and managing editor of the International
Socialist Review. He responds to my Tasks piece in his reply to a book review I did, writing:

1.
My critical comment about Pham’s article not providing us with anything useful
for those engaged in today’s struggles was not a judgment about him as a person
or about all things that he may have written about the Occupy movement or
anything else. A substantial review article having to do with building the
revolutionary party, however, should contain (in my opinion) something of value
for those of us who are committed to such things.

Le Blanc begins his response by claiming
that my book review’s “obvious purpose is to persuade the reader
that Tony Cliff’s book is little more than a mass of ‘egregious
misrepresentations’ and ‘has so many gross factual and political errors that it
is useless as a historical study of Lenin’s actions and thoughts.’ This is a
demolition job. It doesn’t offer much that we can use and build on as we face
the challenges of today and tomorrow.”

I
drew my conclusions about Cliff’s book only
after I closely studied what Lenin said and did and compared it to what
Cliff claimed Lenin said and did. The more I studied, the more striking the
divergences became.

January 31, 2012 – Submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal -- Amid a continuing crisis of capitalism, the renaissance of Lenin
studies – what I once referred to as “Lenin’s return” – continues. Aspects of
this find reflection in new books, new articles, symposiums and debates as we
attempt to clarify the actuality of Lenin’s thought and example, and (for some
of us) their relevance for the situations we face.

Published in 2002 by Resistance Books, first published 1996 -- There
is no more pressing task for revolutionary Marxists today than the construction
of a party capable of leading the proletariat's struggle against world
capitalism. But as the record of the past decades has shown, building
such a party requires more than good intentions. It requires a scientific
understanding of the relationship between the proletariat and its class-conscious
vanguard. No one understood that relationship better than Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin; he proved that by building the strongest, most flexible, and
most successful workers' party in history -- the Bolshevik Party.

January 24, 2012 – Submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Tony
Cliff's Lenin: Building the Party published in 1975 was the first
book-length political biography of Lenin written by a Marxist. As a result, it
shaped the approach of subsequent investigations by academics like Lars T. Lih
as well as the thinking of thousands of socialists in groups like the British
Socialist Workers Party (SWP, founded by Cliff), the US International Socialist Organization and Paul Le Blanc, author of Lenin and the
Revolutionary Party and former member of the US SWP (no relation to Cliff's
group).

Cliff begins his biography by debunking the USSR’s official state
religion of Lenin-worship that “endowed [Lenin] with superhuman attributes”.
Yet throughout the book Cliff refers to these “superhuman attributes”: